Case study · B2B SaaS
How a software-as-a-service company with 1,800 active accounts in Mexico moved from buying swag per event on an urgent basis to running an annual programme with onboarding kits for new customers, channel-partner gifts, customer-success material and pieces for the annual customer event. Figures are anonymised but representative of a real programme coordinated from the Mexico City hub.
Marketing and commercial operations used to buy swag separately, every time a quarterly kickoff or an event approached. Quality varied from supplier to supplier, corporate colours sometimes drifted off tone, and the customer success team received a different kit every two months to hand to accounts moving up plan tiers.
The first problem was brand. The company had rebranded two years earlier and the institutional palette — two specific blues identified by Pantone number — was never reproduced the same way across orders. A tee could come out cobalt instead of the institutional blue, a notebook could land in a grey tone not in the manual. Marketing noticed that at some accounts the first visual contact with the brand was through swag outside the palette.
The second problem was budget. Every team — marketing, operations, customer success, events — bought through its own supplier and its own budget. Total annual merch spend was high, visibility into what was delivered to whom was zero, and there was no way to know whether swag was actually moving pipeline or just being given out by inertia.
The third was logistics coordination. A SaaS company with 1,800 active accounts in Mexico onboards new customers every week, refreshes kits quarterly and gifts channel partners who can be anywhere in the country. Without a single interlocutor, every team managed its own courier and its own delivery times, with uneven outcomes.
The programme was built as an annual catalogue with four lines and independent calendars. Line A was the onboarding kit for new accounts: a rigid cardboard box with magnetic closure, an A5 hard-cover notebook, a roller pen, an isotype sticker and a welcome card carrying the new customer's name. The box was delivered in the first kickoff call with the customer success team, within 14 days of contract signature.
Line B was the channel-partner gift: a technical backpack with laptop compartments, a stainless thermal bottle with a laser engraving of the partner's name and a hand-stitched notebook with a fabric-wrapped cover in the institutional colour. This line shipped at the close of every quarter to partners who had hit channel quota, with SKU selection by partner tier (silver, gold, platinum).
Line C was customer-success material: an organic cotton tote with the embroidered isotype, a pique tee with the name of the internal programme and a sticky-notes set in the institutional palette. This line was handed to the CS team so they could gift it during quarterly review meetings with strategic accounts, without going through an external courier.
Line D was the annual customer event material: a jute tote with screen print, a combed-cotton tee, a ceramic mug with engraving and an A5 notebook carrying the event agenda. This line was delivered on site, at event check-in, counted per table and replenished daily from the regional distribution centre.
The four lines ran on different calendars but with one interlocutor and one catalogue. Line A ran continuously, with production every 14 days and delivery to the client's office or to the lead CS's home. Line B activated four times a year, aligned with quarter close. Line C shipped to the CS team at the start of every fiscal quarter, without external courier. Line D concentrated in the two weeks before the annual event, with delivery to the host hotel.
Each shipment left with a CFDI 4.0 stamped by Corp-Merch, with the Carta Porte 3.0 complement when the move crossed SAT thresholds. Per-recipient traceability lived on a consolidated sheet the commercial operations team pulled monthly to cross-check against the CRM, without asking Corp-Merch for reports each time.
The 4,620 pieces shipped across the 2024-2025 cycle without palette deviations detected in brand audit. The promise to the CS team to deliver the onboarding kit within 14 days of signature was met on 96% of cases, with a real average of 9.4 days.
Commercial operations consolidated annual merch spend through one supplier and one monthly report. Average unit cost dropped 14% versus the previous cycle, mostly because the closed catalogue let us consolidate fabric, cardboard and stainless purchases, and because the four annual waves shipped from the same distribution centre on a single price table.
Marketing measured, through a survey sent to 240 new accounts, that brand recall of the onboarding kit was still at 71% at the 90-day mark. The channel-partner gift correlated with a 9-point improvement in the partner programme's Net Promoter Score, compared with partners who had not received a gift the previous quarter.